Guest post by Jurek Molnar The Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri (1935 – 2010) is said to be the most important contemporary Arab thinker, whose work is well acknowledged among Arab and Muslim audiences, but was until a decade ago completely unknown in the West. Thanks to efforts of some Western Arab speaking researchers, parts of his works were translated first into French, and then later into English and German. Al-Jabri became widely known in Arab faculties and among philosophically interested readers in the Islamic world when he published “The Critique of Arab Reason”, which appeared in four volumes between 1984 and 2001 in Morocco. He was born in Morocco…

An important point that is too often neglected: There are women in Iran and elsewhere who choose to wear the hijab but firmly (and bravely) insist that other women should not be forced to do so. These photos show many Iranian women understand the fight against forced hijab is not about whether the hijab is good or bad! It’s about choice & equality. It’s about dignity. That’s why women who wear the hijab by choice are also part of this movement. #دختران_خیابان_انقلاب pic.twitter.com/VJAtLxDhb3 — Omid Memarian (@Omid_M) January 31, 2018 Update: Surely this woman remembers what it was like in Iran before the forced hijab. Elderly #Iranian grandma ties her…

Who can forget George Galloway of the Respect party winning Bradford West in a by-election after running a foul sectarian campaign back in 2012? And his tweet saying “shattered but happy after the Blackburn triumph?” The 2015 General Election’s brightest spot was Naz Shah’s defeating him and telling him off for running a further disgusting sectarian campaign. Shah’s back story includes a forced marriage and Galloway’s agent was doubting this on the grounds that if mother and other witnesses attended a forced marriage, it wasn’t forced! Shah comes from a disability rights background and is an eloquent speaker. It was Shah’s “anti-Zionist” remarks that kicked off the whole Ken Livingstone…

Further to the post re the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) adding Maajid Nawaz to the list of “anti Muslim extremists” here’s a round up of the lazy or malicious mis-readings by the SPLC and some counter arguments. The SPLC though has dug in. They have read a couple of Guardian posts, one written by that creepy undercover cop Bob Lambert and know Nawaz must be an anti-Muslim extremist. They even think Nawaz attending a strip club on his stag night makes him an anti-Muslim extremist (that’s half the male British population on a watch list then). This of course is incredible to anyone who has read anything by Nawaz,…

An editor for the “reformist” Iranian newspaper Shargh has been live-tweeting the destruction of the Saudi embassy in Tehran in the wake of the Sunni Saudi regime’s execution of leading Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr. RIGHT NOW: Saudi embassy in Tehran on fire after stormed by protesters over execution of Shiite leader al-Nimr pic.twitter.com/k92bTkh5hb — Sobhan Hassanvand (@Hassanvand) January 2, 2016 Video shows protesters inside Saudi embassy in Tehran pic.twitter.com/DEmsNLI6ZG — Sobhan Hassanvand (@Hassanvand) January 2, 2016 Scores marched through Nimr’s home district of Qatif shouting “down with the Al Saud” and, in the neighboring country of Bahrain, police fired tear gas at several dozen people who gathered to protest the…

Perhaps this offers a bit of hope for better news in the coming year: Their M.O. is a tried and terrifying one: Launch a raid, single out Christians, and then spray them with bullets. But when Al-Shabaab militants ambushed a bus Monday, things didn’t go according to plan. A group of Kenyan Muslims shielded the Christian passengers and told the attackers they were prepared to die together. The Muslim passengers, who were mostly women, told the Islamic militants to kill them all or leave them alone, witnesses said. ….. In the Monday attack, the gunmen ordered Muslim passengers to come out of the bus and separate themselves from the Christians.…

A bit of a fuss is being made in the papers and on social media today about an “experiment” undertaken by some Dutch viral-video generators in which they aim to demonstrate: What happens when you read people the Bible but tell them it’s the Koran? According to The Metro, “With all this in mind, two men in Holland set out to conduct an experiment about how ready people were to generalise Islam without being critical of their own beliefs.” Of course, the experiment (or more accurately, ‘prank’) was a smug attempt to show how bigoted Westerners are, etc, etc. But it made a huge methodological mistake which actually demonstrates the opposite of…

A sitcom parody about an American Muslim family desperately trying to prove their American-ness. And here’s a report on NPR about two young American Muslim women who have created a podcast called #GoodMuslimBadMuslim— one of whom identifies herself as a “pork-eating, alcohol-drinking, premarital-sex-having Muslim.”

The Washington Post features an article about the popular comedian Humza Arshad, who spreads an anti-extremist message to British Muslim youth. At a time when the flow of British Muslims to the war in Syria shows no sign of ebbing, Arshad has positioned himself as the anti-Jihadi John. Like Mohammed Emwazi, the scowling Islamic State executioner, Arshad is a London-raised Muslim from an immigrant family whose face has become instantly recognizable to millions of young Brits through videos uploaded online. But where Emwazi seeks to terrify the world and seduce fresh recruits to join his bloodthirsty crusade, Arshad’s message is precisely the opposite: Laugh at extremism; don’t fall prey to…

This is a guest post by Mehrdad Amanpour Another day, another outrage carried out by evil & deranged individuals and the usual arguments ensue. “It had everything/nothing to do with Islam”. “Muslims should/should not apologise”. The murders in Paris certainly have nothing to do with the Islam I recognise, nor the Islam followed by the overwhelming majority of Muslims. But clearly they were motivated by a brutal and amoral interpretation of Islam that was believed by the perpetrators. To say otherwise is delusional. But let’s be in no doubt that the number of Muslims who support killing cartoonists is tiny. That said, the proportion of British Muslims who believe depicting the…